1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to a monitoring system for monitoring the performance of computer systems, and in particular, to the graphical monitoring of groups of the performance data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information technology specialists, often called system administrators, are responsible for maintaining, managing, protecting and configuring computer systems and their resources. More and more, such maintenance includes ensuring multiple users local and remote access to vast resources of data over a great number of computer applications and systems, including the Internet. Moreover, system administrators are asked to provide access to these highly reliable systems at practically any time of any day while ensuring the system's integrity is not threatened by dataflow bottlenecks or excessive overhead.
To aid administrators in ensuring accessibility and system integrity, computer systems generally provide performance data in the form of performance reports, query-accessible tables, printouts, and the like. However, as system complexity increases, these reports and tabular data become increasingly difficult for the administrator to fully process and comprehend. In addition, bottlenecks caused by user overload, improper application configurations, and the like, can happen relatively quickly, and tabular data typically does not lend itself well to quickly locating and addressing potential or actual problems.
One solution for monitoring of the performance of computer systems included a graphical system for representing the active processes on a computer network. In the graphical system, various graphical objects represent differing characteristics of each network process. The various graphical objects change their attributes, such as shape, color, rotation, texture, and movement, as the corresponding process changes its characteristics.
However, these types of graphical systems suffer from drawbacks similar to the conventional performance reports and tabular data. For example, the foregoing graphical system represents each active process and its changing characteristics with numerous on-screen graphics. Moreover, each of the numerous on-screen graphics changes its graphical attributes as its corresponding process changes characteristics. As the complexity of computer systems increase, such individual representations overload the available graphic area and create confusion and difficulty in quickly and efficiently identifying actual or potential data bottlenecks or improper system parameter configurations.